KINIGUIDE - What is the Jana Wibawa programme?

Travis Bickel: Nothing new or surprising. In Malaysia, racism and corruption go hand in hand. Two sides of the same coin. Malay leaders cheating the Malays. The saddest thing isn’t the corruption. The saddest thing is that the Malays continue to be blind.

They continue to blame the non-Malays when it is their own Malay leaders that steal from them. They are blinded by racism. That is why corruption can flourish. This has been going on for ages and will continue.

Man on the Silver Mountain: Corruption, money laundering, and kleptocracy come in many forms but the objectives are the same - to steal money from the nation, one way or the other. At the end of the day, the money was public money, paid and raised through taxes. 

We had some fancy-sounding names, all supposedly to help the rakyat, like 1MDB or Jana Wibawa. Of course, the declared purposes are all good but in practice they are just fronts to channel the money for some other uses. These dirty politicians have no principles, are unscrupulous, greedy, and hypocritical. We must clear the dirt, they are like dirt, now. Send them to the slammer so that they will cause no further harm to the country.

Existential turd: No effort is spared to help the majority of Malays in the economic, academic, and sports sectors. Let’s imagine what analogous projects and policies would be like if the government spends the same effort in helping minorities to succeed in the public sector:

1. No tender, direct negotiation -> no interview, direct hire;

2. Exclusively hiring Malay contractors for some projects -> exclusively hiring minorities for some departments/ministry 

3. Internal opaque evaluations (read: no firm standards)

4. Oodles of funding -> huge salaries

If it is good for the goose, it should be good for the gander. If it is bad for the gander, it should be bad for the goose as well.

I disgree: Jana Wibawa, or Program Jana Ekonomi Pemerkasaan Kontraktor Bumiputera (Bumiputera Contractor Empowerment Economic Generation Programme).

The programme is a pretext for helping the poor bumiputera contractors. It is actually helping to enrich their respective parties through the solicitation of funds as they, the contractors, directly negotiated for the projects.

One ringgit for you, lima-puluh sen (50 sen) for me. Oh yes! all negotiated contracts are under the Official Secrets Act.

Newday: November 2020 - that was during the period of the uncalled-for State of Emergency? No oversight or ability to ask questions? Has the auditor-general had the opportunity to pry open the books to measure its success? Would be fascinating to read - I can imagine the wastage and leakage, failure to complete projects on time, or if at all.

What is seriously disturbing is the one-eyed focus on Malay/bumiputera contractors when everyone was suffering. Reflects their budget allocations as well.

Headhunter: Turned out to be a guise for politicians and their families to suck money from the rakyat. This is what negotiated tenders are all about as shown by the auditor-general in the annual reports.

This is one of the main causes of major corruption in the country. It should never have existed. The brainchild of corrupt politicians to fatten their own pockets. Stealing in the name of helping the bumiputeras. How noble is that?

Apanama is back: Jana Wibawa - another New Economic Policy-type project that seemed successful in creating Malay-first rich Malays, whereby the elite Malay will cheat and shortchange their own race, Malay/bumiputera contractors in the name of empowerment.

“Satu lagi project tipu bumiputera, dari bumiputera, untuk bumiputera dan bagi bumiputera.”

When new elite Malays are formed, there will be new court clusters too.

Majulah Malaysiaku!

Jaycee: The government should scrap this racist programme. Else, they should set up a programme to help Chinese and Indian contractors too.

We all know that in this corrupted country, all of the million and billion-ringgit projects were awarded to the politicians’ family members and or cronies. This is how all these corrupted ministers become richer.

They have so much money that they need to hide the money offshore. The Pandora Papers already revealed their names. All of them must be prosecuted and the money should be repatriated back to Malaysia.

ScallopEatMcD: There are thousands of projects that come under the guise of bumiputera/Malay policy, where the politicians and civil servants of the racist government use it as a shield to award suspicious projects to Malay cronies only and get a cut of it.

This has been going on for five decades and the government looks like it is not going to change anything. So much talk about anti-corruption but still keeping the policy intact. How are you going to prevent it from happening again if the policy is not changed?

MVA: It is sad that pre-qualified contractors are also involved in massive corruption. The programme is camouflaged under bumiputera assistance programme. In reality, it is to pad the pockets of well-connected bumiputera millionaires, not the millions of B40 bumiputera.